Opinion: Why California must invest in climate resilient schools

As weather events, power outages, fire, smoke and excess heat occur frequently, school leaders face disruptions that affect student learning. As Santa Clara County’s Superintendent of Schools, I know these disruptions are of longer duration and are more extreme.

In the 2018-19 school year alone, more than 1.2 million California students were impacted by school closures, overwhelmingly due to wildfire, smoke, heat and unhealthy air quality. These school closures not only lead to decreased learning, they also negatively impact students’ physical and mental health. Studies show these impacts are not the result of an unpredictable catastrophe but a pattern that will continue to worsen unless we can keep schools open through our increasingly complicated climate reality.

That’s why a coalition of nearly 50 leading doctors, medical and environmental health researchers, educators, youth and community groups has released the Climate-Resilient California Schools: A Call to Action — a report calling for unprecedented but necessary change. It will take a decade-long, $150 billion statewide effort to prepare schools to stay open and continue in-person instruction and provide essential services amid a changing climate.

By bringing together research in education, pediatrics and public health, this report paints a comprehensive picture of how the climate crisis is impacting California’s children. Taking action to implement its recommendations will prevent the negative consequences of what happens when too many children miss too much school. The pandemic already has shown us the damage it does.

Over the last two years, we’ve lost decades of improvement in student achievement in reading and math. Children who need the most academic help fell behind the furthest, and racial disparities that plague student success grew wider. Teenagers reported an increase in symptoms of anxiety and depression, alongside a decreased sense of “school connectedness,” a feeling that can be beneficial for youth mental health, according to the CDC. Even in Santa Clara County, 47% of fifth graders surveyed reported having “unmet mental health and emotional needs.”

Heat, smoke, and fire threaten to force schools to double down on those losses. But there’s a better way.

The report, developed under the leadership of experts from Stanford and Berkeley, envisions a future where schools can stay open, educate our students and support their physical and emotional health. Acting on the report’s recommendations will help protect California’s schools from the impacts of climate change, ensuring they can continue to be places where students know they can always find relief from hunger or asthma, places where they can gather and learn in safety despite climate change.

This paradigm shift would help make schools havens from climate change — while curtailing their contribution to the problem. Currently, two out of five school buildings in California are at least 50 years old. This aging infrastructure, which often includes fossil-fuel-powered heating systems and inadequate cooling, is not only expensive to repair, it adds to carbon emissions. To ensure schools can stay open for in-person learning, it’s long past time to move to electric heat pumps and solar power. Green schoolyards must replace blacktop “heat islands,” and diesel bus fleets must give way to emission-free electric replacements where possible.

These upgrades aren’t just beneficial for school communities, they are necessary steps on the path to achieving California’s statewide goal of net-zero emissions.

Additionally, schools must be places where students experiencing fear and anxiety can find social-emotional support. We have to prevent reinforcing a youth mental health crisis caused by the pandemic by responding directly to the rising climate anxiety students are feeling. The best way to do this is by preparing schools to stay open so in-person instruction can remain a constant, even as the climate crisis continues to disrupt other aspects of our daily lives.

For all Californians, the cost of action to make our schools climate resilient is significant. For our children, the cost of failing to act now is far higher.

Mary Ann Dewan is the Santa Clara County superintendent of schools. She is a contributing author to the Climate-Resilient California Schools: A Call To Action report.